I'm on the train on my way into work – it's pretty cold out. Yesterday I had my day off so my boyfriend and I went out to look at an apartment. It was a ton of fun and it's the cutest apartment I've ever seen, it even has extra space for our desks and tons of closet space and a linen closet. It's just that it's at the top of our budget and it's not much closer to work – it would shave off like maybe 25 minutes, 35 if it's an express train.
But I really want it. The landlords seemed totally cool and I know I can afford it with the money I'm making now, and I'd be with him, which I really need to be soon. Life is simple when we're together.
So I said I'd talk about fat shaming and what that subject seems like to me. There's a lot of shaming that happens in the world – loosely described, it means being disparaging about a person's characteristics (or at least that's how I imagine it) – and I think that while it may be unkind, it serves a purpose. Society shames things that it doesn't want to be a part of, for moral or immoral reasons, for any reasons.
As a society we shame things that we find immoral, unprofessional, or too far out there. We do this with our body language, our eye contact, our words and our actions. Our intentions aren't always picked up by the person we are being influenced by and we're not always intentionally trying to influence them, but we all react to things we do not want in our vicinity.
If I am on the train and someone is being rude or talking obnoxiously, you can usually tell by the way I posture myself. I might purse my lips or straighten my posture or huff.
If I see that one of my employees is being treated badly by a customer I will intervene, putting myself non-threateningly between the customer and the employee, and command their attention, bringing with me as much authority as I can muster. This happened a few days ago, when a customer brought in a mess of old bracelets and charms and tags that didn't match each other at all, and was giving a sales associate a hard time about it. She was demanding replacements even though we A) didn't carry these anymore, B) couldn't tell what a lot of them had been and C) have no proof of purchase in our stores.
All of which I had to step in and inform her of, because I did not like her body language and the way she was speaking to my associate.
Often times, if we're in public, we will restrain our displeasure at someone's actions. For example, the other night on the train when I saw that fatass being disparaging to the other lady, I did not step in. But I'll rant about it on here to show my displeasure as I did.
When it comes to physical attributes, there is a lot of debate about whether shaming someone can push them to be better. There are a lot of stories about unhealthy people who were shamed about their weight/diet and stood up and made it better to spite their abuser. But it isn't clear to me that through their reaction they have not made their abuser an actual force for good in their life at all.
I've been heavier before and I can't really say if fat shaming ever helped me. I do recall – and I actually talk about this moment pretty often – a time in high school when I was made fun of for my lack of cute, and it stayed with me and made me want to look nicer.
I was in sixth grade and I was going to a small private school. There were only a couple kids in each grade and it was a religious institution, although less so than others. Most of the girls were already sexualized – booty shorts and too-tight shirts, padded bras, straightened bleached hair, eyeliner, heels. Zero of which I was allowed to wear. We were twelve.
I wonder often if I would have been popular if I had been allowed to do those things for my image, or if the reason I wasn't allowed to is that I didn't have the body for it. I was always a chunky kid.
The head of the pack was a taller girl – the skinniest and most cocky, the one whose dad coached the basketball team where I sat on the bench and watched while cameramen took pictures of little girls in booty shorts.
She really was beautiful. I mean sure, in a shallow way. But someone would love her. She would never be without suitors. She would never lack a prom date. She would never have to buy her own drinks.
Pros and cons. Right?
One time she and I were talking. Keep in mind I was not a well socialized child and back then I had no idea what was acceptable or socially viable to talk about and with whom. But one time I told her she was beautiful, and that I bet all the boys had crushes on her.
She says to me “Sure, but they don't really like me, just how I look. That's where you're lucky not to look good. When a guy says he likes you, you'll know it's for your personality.”
Yep, she was twelve. I don't remember being particularly offended, because it was a backhanded compliment and I didn't know what those were yet. I already knew I was ugly. The boy I did have a crush on was the ugliest at the school and limped. Even he didn't give me the time of day.
Of course now that I'm older it's easier to understand. No one should have been thinking about anyone that way when we were kids. But everyone thought of her that way already. I was just a potato or something.
Anyway that moment stuck with me most out of every moment at that school. I tell it to people when I describe myself as an ugly kid, because now that I'm older and I've grown out of a lot of my weight and my acne and learned how to be presentable, I'm decent-looking enough that no one would call me ugly.
No one hits on me either really but that's fine by me most of the time. I have enough to deal with. I get just enough second glances and random smiles to keep my ego where I like it and not so much that anyone has anything to worry about (: A random extra donut in my bag this evening when I left work, a little extra attention when I go out to eat, a little extra alcohol in my drinks sometimes, but never anything forward.
It definitely didn't make my problems worse, what she said. It alerted me that my suspicions about my appearances were true, and that I wasn't imagining things. That my sense of self was pretty accurate.
Today it makes me proud of how far I've come. A low to measure my highs against. Looking in the mirror now, no one would say I didn't have beauty in some measure. They might say I'm thirty pounds heavier than the standard for my height (which I am) but that I wear it well and I know how to dress it to work. They might say that I have acne (which I do) but that my style with cosmetics is a classy and natural way to get around that. They might say that my hair isn't an attractive color (which it's not).
That's it, I don't actually do anything to help my hair situation (:
I honestly don't think that it harmed me when she spoke her mind like that. Part of me knew she was right, and thought that she might be genuinely trying to pass along some wisdom, or encourage me, in a bitchy way.
I mean it hurt. But it didn't harm me. It was emotionally painful but nothing that lowered my chances in life. But I think it was actually my decision not to let it hinder me.
That's a whole other two conversations: the difference between hurt and harm, and the fact that we decide whether we let emotional pain lower our quality of life.
Read on :)